


There is a Light that Never goes Out

by PudentillaMcMoany



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, M/M, Muggle/Wizard Relations, Smoking, Songfic, well REMUS is a muggle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 01:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6883438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PudentillaMcMoany/pseuds/PudentillaMcMoany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus is a muggle, and Sirius is Sirius. When Sirius leaves home, Remus takes him for a long drive in his battered car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There is a Light that Never goes Out

**Author's Note:**

> Remember when I was 20 and I loved the Smiths so much and I wrote SONGFIC? And warped the temporal line of Harry Potter so that I could have Remus driving Sirius around? And I thought that it was A GOOD IDEA?  
> Today I decided that translating in english my past endeavours would be a good idea, because I'm easily cooled out.  
> By the end of it I wasn't cooled out anymore, but shouldn't my translating efforts be rewarded, I thought. And so I posted it.  
> [Originally posted on 23/08/2011]

_June 1977_

 

The rain patted silver bullets on the windows, striping their frosty glass with translucent traces like the slime of a snail.

From inside the car the city looked like it was made of nothing but sounds, punctuated by the blurry lights of restaurants and off licence made even blurrier by the occasional vibration of the car whenever another vehicle passed nearby.

As he waited, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, Remus had the curious feeling of being inside a spaceship, which was queer as he wasn’t inside a spaceship, he was inside his Zastava 101 in a freezing cold night of June.

A knock of knuckles on his windscreen pulled him away from his thoughts; he started so vehemently that his glasses almost fell, so that when he opened the window they were askew on his too-long nose, and it took him a while to put in focus the drenched boy smiling from behind the fogged window.

“Go new, go Yugo.” The boy regaled him with a Vulcan salute and the singsong recitation of his car’s advertisement. The rain dripped down his high cheekbones and the thin profile of his lips, over the enticing twinkle in his grey eyes.

“Sirius, your competence in my culture is- well, actually it’s inappropriate.” Lacking for a better adjective, Remus sighed and leaned to unlock the safety on the passenger’s door. The other boy shook his head. “Open the boot,” he ordered, and before Remus knew he was helping him to load in the back of his car an enormous trunk, studded and menacing, which had tried to pinch his bottom when he had turned around to push it inside with his back. They ended up succeeding only when Sirius suddenly remembered a _very trusty spell_ , and anyway they were both soaking wet by the time they went back into the car, and the car was rather flooded too, because he had left the window half-open.

In the car, Remus held fast to the lifeline of the crank handle, and only when he was sure that both of them were safe and in the dry he felt that he could talk, as he dried a lens of his NHS glasses on the drenched hem of his brown cardigan.

“I hope you have a good reason for making me come here at _eleven_. Just so you know, that mirror you gave me is terrifying, and I had to lie to my da, and I don’t know if he believed me when I told him that my classmate _Oliver Twist_ needed a lift to go see his cat in hospital. Christ, he _winked_ at me. He thinks I’m off having sex with some girl.”

“Did you really tell him my name is Oliver Twist?”

“I thought it was more plausible than Sirius Black,” he said. He hesitated before asking again, his voice lower: “So, this valid reason?”

Sirius escaped his question by holding out his wand. He pointed it towards Remus so that the warm wind it blew could dry his clothes and mousy hair, and Remus was so grateful that he decided not to enquire further, but only to ask him: “Where do we go?”

“Take me out,” smiled Sirius, pointing the jet of warm air towards himself. “Where there’s music and there’s people and they’re young and alive.”

Remus could not help but to feel the sting of jealousy. Not even with years of practice he could hope to maintain a modicum of aplomb in a situation such as this, wet to the bone in a minuscule car. And yet Sirius seemed completely at ease, no, seemed to be enjoying himself, splayed on the passenger’s seat as beautiful as a god- that is a slightly punk version of a god- who talked like a song and had a pleasantly raspy voice.

“Yes, mister Spock,” said Remus, and he struggled with the gear to plunging his little car in the traffic at the stratospheric speed of twenty miles per hour. Then, as Sirius wasn’t saying anything and he was starting to feel slightly queasy, he asked: “When should I bring you back?”

“Oh, I’m never going back,” shrugged Sirius in the most mundane tone he could muster, and that was when Remus saw it, the uneasiness. It looked like a crack in his smile.

He could have enquired further, prodded a little bit, but he resolved against it, and fixed his eyes on the road instead. It unfurled inviting in front of them, a treacle-black trail guiding them outside, and as he drove Remus felt that that like he was drowning, even with the windows closed, in the earthy smell of rain of the English countryside, which seemed peacefully asleep under the stunning full moon.

Sirius seemed to feel the change too. When it stopped raining he opened the window a little bit; he leaned with his head on the glass, a hand full of rings in his hair, and with distant eyes, lips a tense line, he gazed at something mysterious and far away, at an abyss that resembled him.

Sirius had always been a bit of a mystery for Remus. Never a scary one, of course, but a mystery nonetheless. To Remus, friendship with Sirius often felt like staying very still in front of the half-closed gate of someone else’s garden, peeping inside, imagining which sort of life the people inside might lead, but fearful of being discovered, or worse, invited in.

They had known each other since they were eleven, and yet Remus thought that he did not know much about Sirius Black.

It’s weird, being eleven. You’re too big to play with toys (at least in front of your friends that is), but not yet big enough to contain whatever comes next, the great leaps of passion and the great leaps of hope and the fear, mostly the fear. So it was that when the strange eleven-years-old that was Sirius had told him that he would be attending a prestigious institute of Witchcraft and Wizardry Remus had believed him, and that he had not been afraid, not even when Sirius had showed him how he could jump an entire flight of stairs without hurting himself, levitating gently towards the end.

Sirius’s mum was another matter. Beautiful as she was, Remus had been afraid of her, and he had learned to keep his distance whenever he met her, which usually happened when she found out that Sirius had sneaked away from home (she always knew) and she yanked him away from Remus, on to who knows where.

Even if Remus was only a muggle ( _this is what you call someone who is not a wizard_ , Sirius had explained to him on the Summer of their twelve years), he was very curious, and very brave. They had spent infinite summer evenings sneaking out to meet in some secret place, and to talk and talk, and, when they were older, to drink a furtive pint.

Remus had also become very good, throughout the years, at intercepting Sirius’s owls without them pecking him to death. This of course had been before the previous Summer, when Sirius had given him the two-way mirror of which he possessed the twin. It had been a little bit like being gifted an engagement ring and a little bit like being given a walkie-talkie, except how many people can claim to posses the magical and slightly walt-disney-esque equivalent of a walkie-talkie? That gift had left him more embarrassed and confused than he already was with everything Sirius, and it had ultimately led to the dizzying bewilderment that he now felt, which in that moment seemed to have been taken permanent residence in his knotted stomach.

“Just so I know, do you have a place to sleep? Because I wouldn’t want to drive you back to your house tomorrow morning, you know, with your ma and all.”

“I don’t want to go back anymore, Remus. And it’s _their_ home, not my home. I’m not welcome anymore.”

Remus sighed. “Do you have a place to go?”

“I have James, obviously, James Potter. I’m going to James’s first thing tomorrow. Sent him an owl and all that.” He shrugged, and for a moment he seemed incredibly lost. “Not that- not that I have any idea how to- how to...” He seemed not to know how to continue, so he shrugged again with an air of finality. Remus did the same.

“Oi Remus, can I smoke?” Sirius chuckled nervously, shaking fingers extracting a battered cigarette box from his leather jacket.

“Is there any way I could stop you?”

“No. No, you’re right,” replied Sirius, already exhaling smoke from his nostrils and his slackened mouth.

“I don’t know how you wizards are with medicine, but you should know that it’s very dangerous for us muggles.”

“You mean smoking kills and all that rubbish?”

“Like being ran off by a double-decker bus.” Remus pondered this for a while, and then he added: “Only very, very slowly.”

“Well, my chap, if you’re planning to have us ran off by a double-decker bus I’ll have you know that it would be a heavenly way to die.”

“What about that ten-ton truck?” Grinned Remus pointing with his chin towards the big truck advancing towards them on the opposite side of the road.

“The pleasure, the privilege is mine.”

Remus punched him on the shoulder. At first they chuckled quietly, as you do with a bad joke, but then  they laughed and laughed more and more loudly, like a wave becoming taller and taller before breaking on the coast. They both had their good reasons for laughing, and none of them had to do with double-decker buses or ten-ton trucks.

“Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t care, really.”

And so Remus drove and drove until the town with all its blinding lights was very far away, and he drove some more with the night engulfing them like a rain-heavy cloak, and he drove until he knew that he couldn’t drive anymore. He activated the turn signal, which with is ticking of strange insect guided them to a dry passageway, where he stopped with a grateful smile.

They were silent for a long time, Sirius smoking cigarette after cigarette slumped on the passenger’s seat, Remus looking pensively the mobile air around him, the red and black murals and the crinkled advertisements, and the dust and the scraps that not even the wind could blow away.

Drops of rain had stilled on the windscreen, condensing in a pearly chain around the wipers. Remus could feel their shadows striping his face like a net of scars, real as the breath of Sirius next to him or the heart beating in his chest, almost obscene in that cocoon-like silence.

It was to hide that all too human murmur that Remus coughed. “Do you want me to drive you to James’s?” He did not know how to be of use, and he did not know why Sirius had called him, of all the friends he had- of all the friends _like him_ he had. He did not know how to not feel uneasy, or how to not feel lost.

Sirius shook his head. “I’m going on my own, thanks. I can disapparate now, you know.”

“Transporters and all, right?” Remus reached for Sirius’s cigarette, an atypical gesture that Sirius left blessedly uncommented. He left the half-smoked cigarette to him, and lit another one for himself, throwing an askance look at Remus from time to time. “You’re just being petty,” he sniggered. “Your car is amazing, Remus.”

“The pride of Yugoslavian engineering! Strong cushions, you know, for the _bumps_.”

“No, I’m serious.” They both cackled. “It’s a genius invention, I don’t know if you muggles even notice. You don’t know how many wizards would do anything to have one!”

“Not your family I suppose.”

“No, not them,” sighed Sirius, and there. It was done; there they were. Remus could have prodded just a little, leaned into Sirius to look him in the eyes and ask him. Why did you leave? Or also: why did you call me? Or, but this required too much courage, do you like him as much as I like you?

They were legitimate questions all of them, even the last one, because Sirius had called him when it was already time to go to bed with a shaky voice, and because Sirius had given him a mirror, and Remus needed to talk if he didn’t want to be nothing but a chauffeur for the whole night, to voice his doubts, to take the metaphorical bull by the horns.

Chance was, that even in a metaphor Remus wasn’t a credible matador.

He took a drag from the cigarette with his hand cupped around his mouth, the cold air from outside giving him a small respite. He turned the questions around in his head for longer that was reasonable, or necessary, or dignified, listing them one by one until they lost their meaning completely and he could almost sing them, like nursery rhymes, _humpty dumpty fell from the wall_.

He thought, distractedly, what would happen if his shell cracked. Surely, would he allow Sirius to break his barriers, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not suffice to put him together again.

And so it was that he stayed, very still and very silent, inhaling smoke in anger; he preferred this, really, the letting a strange discomfort take roots in him, to simply asking the question. It was not that he had _decided_ not to ask. It was rather as if an animal instinct had told him that he couldn’t, really. It chained him and it reassured him, and Remus cradled inside him that gentle monster of doubt and uncertainty like a flicker of hope. Because that was what it was, a light that had to be kept alive like a torch against all possible rejections. That lighte so beautiful and warm was also the dying breath of his childhood, and like a nova it shone so bright that it seemed impossible that it should ever go away (but, oh, it would go away soon, which made it even more beautiful).

“There is a light that never goes out,” stuttered Remus half-asleep, throwing the cigarette butt from the window, and he sank into the reclined driver’s seat. He meant the light that he felt inside him, but Sirius, who couldn’t know that and smiled at his left, thought of how in love he was with Remus, and that maybe one day, when they were older, he would find the courage to tell him.

Outside the windows, cars ran on the shiny black highway; the night breathed its fresh breath, and inside a car in a passageway two boys slept.

**Author's Note:**

> See that humprty dumpty bit? It seems WAY TOO CLEVER for 20-years-old me, and I thought I might have nicked it from somewhere at the time. A bit of googling told me that it might after all had been me all along! But mmmh.


End file.
